Reinventing news with a Bang

Starting today We Media is renewing its commitment to expand knowledge for everyone in networked society. We are returning to one of our roots — the news — as a focus for a new initiative.

We call it Bang. Our goal: reinvent the news enterprise. The journalism. The business. The structures. The platforms. The thinking. Everything.

Bang will unfold regularly on this blog. Mark Silverman, a top newspaper editor who worked on change and innovation projects at Gannett, joins us as a blogger, consultant, strategist and trainer on the project. Mark contributes to an agenda that includes publishing, research, invention, building, exploration and pushing boundaries.

Look to this site and Mark’s blog for solutions and presentations, conversations and exchanges, ahas and unconventional thinking. We’ll alert you to findings and activities on our newsletter. (Please sign up here). You can also follow us on Twitter @wemedia.

No one is as smart as everyone, so contact us, too, if you’re interested in blogging, adding capabilities and sharing your expertise.

We’re also seeking to work with a few organizations that have come to the crossroads: reinvent or fail. Since the disruption of the internet in the mid-90s, whimpers from news media have not changed an inevitable fate. Nor do the current sounds. Incremental innovation, the shallow attempts of the past 17 years, is not working. We’re not trying to be unkind or disrespectful, just factual. We’ll cite empirical evidence that makes reinvention an imperative.

We believe that the “people formerly known as the audience” – the “we” part of We Media – lead the way forward. That’s a significant change from internal programs that seek to direct and control transactions for the good of the company but not necessarily the needs of citizens. Our perspective, informed by data, experience and observation, is that the social interactions enabled by new and emerging information technologies better serve those needs. They fundamentally change the way people know. The “next journalism” is already here. So are the next businesses. We’ll show how to create them.

We see “next” as an opportunity to expand knowledge and build futures around an informed society. News is just a part of it. We’ll also address how social interactions and personal technologies unify knowledge throughout a range of connected, human experiences – communications, media, learning, civil society, business, marketing, entrepreneurship, the internet of things and the shape of things.